The Chalk Circle Man

by Fred Vargas

  ‘What did he see?’

  ‘At about ten to midnight a small thin man passed him, running. It was only when he heard the radio this morning that he made the connection. He described an elderly man, slight build, thinning hair, in a hurry and carrying a bag under his arm.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘He left behind him, it seemed to this witness, a slight smell of vinegar.’

  ‘Vinegar? Not rotten apples?’

  ‘No. Vinegar.’

  Danglard was in a better mood now.

  ‘A thousand witnesses, a thousand noses,’ he added, smiling and spreading wide his long arms. ‘A thousand noses, a thousand different interpretations. A thousand interpretations probably add up to a thousand childhood memories. One person thinks of rotten apples, another vinegar, and tomorrow we might have people talking about what? Nutmeg, furniture polish, strawberries, talcum powder, dusty curtains, cough mixture, gherkins … The circle man must have a smell that reminds people of their childhood.’

  ‘Or the smell of a cupboard,’ said Adamsberg.

  ‘Why a cupboard?’

  ‘I don’t know. But childhood smells come from cupboards, don’t they? All sorts of smells get mixed up together, it makes a sort of universal smell.’

  ‘We’re getting off the point,’ said Danglard.

  ‘Not that much.’

  Danglard realised that Adamsberg was starting to float again, to disengage, or whatever he did; at any rate the already vague connections in his logic were being relaxed, so he proposed they should go back to the station.

  ‘I’m not coming with you, Danglard. Take the statement from the vinegar witness without me – I feel like hearing what Mathilde Forestier’s “philosopher friend” has to say.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t interested in Madame Forestier’s case.’

  ‘No, correction, she does interest me, Danglard. I agree with you. She’s blocking our path here. But she doesn’t seriously bother me.’

  In any case, thought Danglard, so few things did seriously bother his commissaire that he wasn’t going to hang about thinking of them. Wait a minute, though. Yes, the story of the stupid dog that drooled and all the rest of it, that had seriously bothered him, and still did. And there were other things of the same order, as he would one day discover, perhaps. It was true, this irritated him. And the better he got to know Adamsberg, the more mysterious his boss became, as unpredictable as a night creature whose heavy, bumbling but effective flight wears out anyone trying to catch it. But he would have liked to borrow some of Adamsberg’s vagueness and uncertainty, the times when his gaze seemed to be dying or burning by turns, making you want either to get away from him or to get closer to him. He thought that if he had Adamsberg’s gaze, he might see things start to wobble, to lose their clear reasonable contours, like trees shimmering in a summer heat haze. Then the world would seem less implacable to him, he would stop wanting to understand every tiny little detail about everything, exploring the remotest areas of the heavens. He would feel less exhausted as a result. But as it was, only white wine enabled him to take his distance, for a brief and, as he knew, artificial moment.

  X

  AS ADAMSBERG HAD BEEN HOPING, MATHILDE WAS NOT AT HOME. He found her elderly assistant, Clémence, leaning over a table covered with photographic slides. On a chair alongside her lay a newspaper, open at the personal ads.

  Clémence was too chatty to be intimidated by him. She wore several layers of nylon overalls, one on top of the other, like onion skins. A black beret was perched on her head, and she was smoking a military-strength Gauloise. She hardly opened her mouth when she spoke, so it was hard to get a glimpse of the famous pointed teeth for which Mathilde liked to provide zoological comparisons. She wasn’t timid, she wasn’t vulnerable, she wasn’t bossy, yet her manner wasn’t exactly affable either. Clémence was such an odd individual that one couldn’t help wanting to listen to her for a while, to find out what it was, underneath all the banal trappings behind which she barricaded herself, that fuelled her energy.

  ‘How were the small ads today?’ Adamsberg asked.

  Clémence shook her head doubtfully.

  ‘Not up to much, monsieur. See this one: “Male, retired, fond of quiet life, own maisonette, seeks female companion, under 55, with taste for eighteenth-century engravings.” Engravings? Not my cup of tea. Or this one: “Pensioner, ex-retail trade, seeks attractive woman, nature lover, for friendship, more if we click.” Nature lover? No, I don’t think so. They all write the same thing, never the truth. What they really should say is: “Self-centred old creep, running to seed, seeks young woman for sex.” Why don’t people say what they mean? Makes you waste a lot of time. Yesterday, now, I tried three of these, none of them any good. What it is, though, the minute they see what I look like they lose interest. So it’s pointless, really. But, my sakes, what else can I do, I ask you?’

  ‘You’re asking me? But why are you so keen to find a husband, Clémence?’

  ‘That’s a question I don’t ask, monsieur. You’re probably thinking, poor old Clémence, she’s a bit funny in the head because her fiancé disappeared long ago, leaving her a note. Ah, but you’d be wrong, because I didn’t care then, when I was twenty, and I don’t care now. Tell you the truth, monsieur, I’m not so keen on men. No, it must be for a bit of excitement in life. Can’t think of anything else to do, that’s the long and short of it. Plenty of women are like that, you want my opinion. I’m not so keen on women either, tell you the truth. They all think, like me, you get married, that’s it, it’ll give you a purpose in life. And you know what, I go to church as well. But if I didn’t keep doing all this, what would I do? I’d probably be out shoplifting, pinching things, spitting at people in the street. Well, there we are, Mathilde thinks I’ve got saving graces. Better to be nice in this world, isn’t it? Less trouble.’

  ‘What about Mathilde?’

  ‘If it wasn’t for Mathilde, monsieur, I’d still be waiting for a miracle down at the metro station. It’s lovely being here with her. I’d do anything to help Mathilde.’

  Adamsberg didn’t try to disentangle all the contradictory messages he was getting. Mathilde had told him that Clémence could call something blue for an hour and red for the next hour, and made up stories about her life depending on who she was talking to. You would need to listen to Clémence for months before you could work out what it all meant. You’d need to be determined. Or a psychiatrist, some would say. But even that would be too late. Everything seemed to be too late for Clémence, that was clear enough, but somehow Adamsberg couldn’t feel sorry for her. Maybe Clémence did have some saving graces, give her the benefit of the doubt, but she wasn’t very appealing, so he wondered why Mathilde had felt like giving her lodgings in the first place, up there in the Stickleback, and then hiring her as an assistant. Now if there was a good person in the basic sense of the word, it was Mathilde. Haughty and sarcastic, but courteous and consumed with generosity. It struck you with violence in Mathilde, and more tenderly in Camille. Danglard, however, didn’t agree about Mathilde.

  ‘Does Mathilde have any children?’

  ‘A daughter, monsieur. Very beautiful. Would you like to see a photo?’

  Suddenly Clémence had become genteel and respectful. It was perhaps time to take what he had come for, before her mood changed again.

  ‘No, no photos, please,’ said Adamsberg. ‘What about her friend, the philosopher, do you know him?’

  ‘You’re asking a lot of questions, monsieur. This isn’t getting Mathilde into trouble, is it?’

  ‘Not at all – on the contrary, so long as we can keep this confidential.’

  This was the kind of police trick that Adamsberg disliked, but how else was he to answer questions like that? So he brought out his formulae like his multiplication tables, to move things on.

  ‘I’ve seen him twice,’ said Clémence with a touch of pride, dragging on her cigarette. ‘He wrote this.’

  She spat
out a few shreds of tobacco, reached over to the bookshelf and held out a thick book towards Adamsberg: The Subjective Zones of Consciousness by Réal Louvenel. Réal, that was a French-Canadian name. Adamsberg allowed a few recollections evoked by the name to swim up in his memory. None of them was very distinct.

  ‘He used to be a doctor,’ Clémence was saying in her distinctive closed-mouth way of speaking. ‘Supposed to be a great genius, I warn you. I don’t know if you’d be able to keep up with his talk. Not wanting to give offence, but you’ve got to be on the right wavelength to understand a word he says. Mathilde seems to know what he’s on about. What I can tell you is that he lives on his own with twelve Labradors. Imagine! Phew, his place must stink!’

  Clémence had switched out of genteel mode. It hadn’t lasted. Now she was being the village idiot again. Then, suddenly, she came out with:

  ‘And what about you, anyway? This circle man, is that interesting? What do you want out of life? Are you in a mess, like everyone else?’

  The old woman was going to unsettle Adamsberg soon, something that happened only rarely. Not that her questions embarrassed him. They were perfectly ordinary questions. He just found that everything about her made him uncomfortable: her clothes, her pinched lips, her hands in gloves so as not to smudge the slides, her weird bursts of conversation. If Mathilde was kind enough to rescue Clémence from her troubles, that was fine. But he didn’t want to be involved. He had the information he had come for, that would do. He withdrew, muttering a few polite words so as not to hurt her feelings.

  Taking his time, Adamsberg looked up the address and phone number of Réal Louvenel. A male voice, strident and highly strung, replied that he could see him that afternoon.

  Réal Louvenel’s house did indeed stink of dog. He was a man constantly in motion, so completely unable to sit for long in a chair that Adamsberg wondered how he managed to write anything at all. He found out afterwards that the philosopher dictated his books. Although he replied quite willingly to Adamsberg’s questions, Louvenel was doing half a dozen other things at the same time: emptying an ashtray, putting papers in the bin, blowing his nose, whistling to one of the dogs, strumming on the piano, doing up his belt another notch, sitting down, getting up again, closing the window, stroking the arm of his chair. A fly wouldn’t have been able to keep up with him, still less Adamsberg.

  Adapting as best he could to this exhausting nervous energy, Adamsberg tried to register the information that emerged from Louvenel’s complex sentences, making strenuous efforts not to let himself be distracted by the sight of the philosopher as he ricocheted off all the surfaces of the room, or by the hundreds of photographs pinned to the walls, mostly representing litters of Labradors, or youths in a state of undress. He understood Louvenel to say that Mathilde would have been more eminent and a deeper thinker if she didn’t always allow her instincts to distract her from her original projects, and that they had known each other since their university days, when they’d sat together at lectures. Then he said that during the evening at the Dodin Bouffant she’d had a bit too much to drink, and had caused a sensation among the customers by saying that she and the chalk circle man were big pals, that only she and he understood anything about the ‘metaphorical renaissance of the pavement as a new field of scientific endeavour’. She had also announced that the wine was excellent and that she would like another glass, that she had dedicated her latest book to the chalk circle man, that his identity was no mystery to her, but that this man’s painful existence would remain a secret, a ‘Mathildism’. As it might be an ‘esoterism’. A ‘Mathildism’ was something she would tell nobody else about, though in any case it was of no intrinsic interest.

  ‘Since I couldn’t stop the flow, I left without hearing the end,’ Louvenel concluded. ‘I find Mathilde embarrassing when she’s had a few drinks. She gets boring, talkative, trying as hard as she can to get everyone to love her. Don’t ever let her start drinking when you’re with her.’

  ‘Did anyone else in the café seem particularly interested in what she was saying?’

  ‘I seem to recall that people were laughing.’

  ‘But why do you think Mathilde follows people in the street?’

  ‘The short answer could be that she collects oddities,’ said Louvenel, fiddling with the creases in his trousers and then with his socks. ‘You could say that these people she preys on are like her fish, she spots them in the street, she chases after them, then she pigeonholes them. But really it’s the opposite. Mathilde’s problem is that she’d be perfectly capable of going and living alone under the sea. Yes, she’s made it her life’s work, she’s a tireless researcher and a distinguished scientist, but all that means very little to her. The real draw is the territory she’s found for herself, underwater. Mathilde is the only deep-sea specialist I know who won’t let anyone accompany her – which is actually very dangerous. “I want to be afraid of everything, and understand everything for myself, Réal, and to go down when I feel like it into a deep trench, into the origins of the Earth.” That’s how she is. Mathilde is a piece of the universe. Since she can’t dissolve into it, she’s made up her mind to study it, so as to grasp its hugest physical dimensions. But the ocean takes her away from human society, and she realises that. Because she’s also got a big slice of good-heartedness, or generosity if you like, that can’t be satisfied with the underwater life. So at regular intervals she comes back to the surface, and gives in to the other temptation, the one that draws her to people, I mean people, not humanity. So she makes her peace with all the millions of little steps people take as they tread the Earth’s crust. She takes everything to extremes, and every scrap of behaviour she can capture, wherever it is, seems a miracle to her. She memorises it all, she notes it all, she “Mathildises” it all. And she picks up lovers along the way, because she’s quite capable of love. And then when she’s tired of all that, when she thinks she has loved her fellow creatures enough, she goes diving again. That’s why she follows strangers in the street. To get a kick out of the flicker of someone’s eyelids or the twist of an elbow, before she goes off again to defy the immensity of the universe on her own.’

  ‘And what about you? Does the chalk circle man suggest anything to you?’

  ‘Don’t think I’m being arrogant, but I’m not interested in such infantile things. Even murder I consider infantile. Child-adults bore me, they’re cannibals. They’re fit only to feed off other people’s vitality. They can’t perceive themselves. And because they can’t perceive themselves, they can’t live unaided, they’re greedy for the sight and the blood of other people. Since they have no self-perception, they bore me. You may know that it is man’s self-perception that interests me – note that I’m saying perception, sensation, not understanding, or analysis – more than all other human approaches, even if I live from day-to-day expedients like everyone else. That’s all I can say about the chalk circle man and his murder, about which I know next to nothing anyway, except that Mathilde talks about him a good deal too much.’

  Réal was retying his shoelaces as he spoke.

  Adamsberg sensed that Réal Louvenel had made an effort to adapt his way of speaking to his interlocutor. He didn’t feel annoyed with him. As it was, he couldn’t be sure that he had exactly understood what this excitable man had meant by self-perception, which was clearly a key word for him. But while listening to the philosopher he had started to think about himself, inevitably – as did everyone else, no doubt. And he had felt that while being unable to observe himself, he did indeed ‘perceive himself’, perhaps in precisely the way Louvenel meant, if only because he sometimes felt ‘uncomfortable at being conscious’. He knew that this perception of one’s own existence could take underground paths, where one’s boots became embedded in mud, and where no answer was forthcoming, and that one needed physical courage not to dismiss it all from one’s mind and get rid of it. But he didn’t dismiss the feeling when it came over him, since it was a moment when he felt quite s
ure that to do so would doom him to being nothing at all.

  At any rate, the chalk circle man didn’t seem to be worrying anyone else. But Adamsberg was untroubled that nobody else was willing to accompany him in his apprehension. That was his own business. He left Louvenel to his fidgety movements, which had calmed down considerably once he had taken a small yellow tablet. Adamsberg deeply distrusted all medicines, and preferred to drag himself round with a high temperature all day rather than take any kind of pill. His little sister had told him that it was very presumptuous always to hope that he would come through it on his own, and that nobody had yet lost their identity by taking an aspirin. His little sister could be a pain sometimes, you wouldn’t believe.

  Back at the station, Adamsberg found Danglard quite far gone. He had acquired some companions to help him start on the afternoon’s bottle of white wine earlier than usual. Sitting round his desk, as if round a café table, Mathilde Forestier and the handsome blind man were knocking the wine back merrily in plastic cups. Things were getting noisy.

  Mathilde’s resonant voice rang out above the din, and Reyer kept his face turned towards the Queen, looking happy. Adamsberg mentally noted once more the blind man’s prodigiously beautiful profile, but it annoyed him to see Reyer keeping his eyes firmly fixed on Mathilde, if that was the right expression. And why in the world should that annoy him? Was it because he sensed that the blind man was going to be snapped up by Mathilde? No. Mathilde was no ordinary woman, and she would lay no nasty traps in which the weaker party is devoured. But at the same time, when someone laid a hand on Mathilde it was difficult just now not to see a hand being laid on Camille. No, he mustn’t confuse them. And anyone had the right to touch Camille, this was a salutary principle he had long ago established. But perhaps it was that Danglard too seemed on the point of being drawn in, despite having been so categorically opposed to Mathilde. It looked as if the two men were engaged in some kind of contest as they sat around the table; the scene smacked of tried and tested seduction gambits, and it had to be admitted that Mathilde, being by now well launched into the white wine, was not insensitive to the atmosphere. After all, she had a perfect right. And Danglard and Reyer too had a perfect right to act like teenagers if they felt like it. What was coming over him, pushing him to act the censor and dictate rules of conduct? Had his own conduct been above reproach toward the young woman in the flat downstairs, with whom he had spent the night? No, not at all. Although a little taken back by the opportunity when it had presented itself, he had chosen his words carefully and had applied his own rules meticulously throughout. But had his conduct towards Christiane been above reproach? Absolutely not; much worse. That reminded him that he hadn’t remembered to think about her. So he might as well have a drink with the others. And ask himself what the hell they were doing there anyway.